Comics in Context #107: Trickster or Treat

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Even more on Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

By Peter Sanderson

[SPOILER WARNING]

So much can happen during the time it takes to write a critique that stretches over three weekly installments of this column. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen turns up on Time's list of the hundred greatest English language novels published from 1923 the year Time began publication, onward (see the list, as well as "Comics in Context" #65: "Artists Alone") Not only is Watchmen a comic book series (since repackaged as a graphic novel) that has made Time's top 100, but it is also (admit it, alternative comix fans) a superhero saga: its listing confirms the importance of the superhero as a metaphor for 20th century Americans. As for the 21st century, Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert's 1602 (yet another comics series drawing on the mythic power of the superhero genre) won the first Quills award for Best Graphic Novel (see "Comics in Context" #13, 18, 21, 25, 28, 33, 35 and 36).

But lest we assume that it is clear sailing for the comics medium toward mainstream cultural acceptance, Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson, castigated by readers for his condemnation of the entire medium in his review of the MirrorMask movie (Sept. 27, 2005), remains unrepentant. In his reply (Oct. 11, 2005), Atkinson writes of "Gaiman's career, volumes of which I have snored through." Did Atkinson use the word "snored" because Gaiman's best known character is the Sandman? No, I rather suspect that Atkinson is too disdainful of Gaiman's work to go to the trouble of consciously concocting such word play. Referring to letter writers' praise of the comics medium, Atkinson sneers, "As for the medium's claim to fabulousness, I'd rather read, thanks." In other words, comics aren't even reading material, much less literature: they're just pictures for subliterates (a word he used in his review) to goggle at. Ooo, I'm scared.

Last week I felt insulted by Atkinson's scorn, but now I've moved beyond that into amusement. He's overreached himself in attacking the medium and toppled into absurdity. Graduate students of the future, should you be looking for a prime example of philistinism towards sequential art in this crucial point in its development, you can do no better than use Atkinson's quotation.

But now I have to attend to more important business. Over the last week I've found myself thinking of Neil Gaiman's latest prose novel, Anansi Boys while watching certain movies on TCM. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) builds its climax upon the sinister side of spider imagery, as its hero, shrunken to insect size, uses a pin to combat a spider far larger than he, as if he were a dragon slayer. (There are clear visual parallels to Sam's battle with the gigantic spider Shelob in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) To function as sympathetic trickster figures, it seems that animals must be smaller and less physically powerful than their opponents; a gigantic spider falls instead into a category more like that of Gaiman's Tiger. The Tiger archetype more clearly turns up in The Incredible Shrinking Man in the form of the hero's cat, who turns from pet to ferocious predator once the protagonist has diminished to mouse size. The following night TCM showed Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942), which is all about Tiger imagery, from the central image of the vicious black panther pacing back and forth in its cage, to the lead actress's role as a murderous were-panther.

Thinking about tricksters also enabled me finally to make sense out of the ending of another classic film that TCM showed this week: the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera. Cornered on the bank of the Seine by a vengeful mob, Lon Chaney's Phantom threateningly raises his clenched fist as if wielding a bomb. The crowd moves back, but then the Phantom opens his hand, showing there is nothing there, and throws back his head in laughter, whereupon the mob moves in for the kill. It is the trickster's final flourish, a joke as a gesture of defiance and panache, putting his signature on his own death.

Though Anansi Boys explains that the trickster Anansi is never evil, there are evil trickster figures in popular culture, such as the Phantom of the Opera; the leading representative of the type in comics is the Joker.

In the animated Superman three-parter "World's Finest" (1997, known on DVD as The Batman-Superman Movie), the Joker meets a fate reminiscent of Chaney's Phantom. Attempting to escape a plummeting aircraft, the Joker sees one of his own tricks, in the form of exploding marbles, hurtling towards him. Despite the imminent prospect of his own death, the Joker launches into gales of laughter. To this trickster, an ironically funny trick is ultimately more important than his own life.

(I see that TCM will be showing the film of Thorne Smith's Topper, one of the influences on Anansi Boys, on Sunday, November 13 at 6 AM EST.)

Having explored major themes in Anansi Boys in the last two installments of this column, last week I began going through the book, cover to cover, selecting and interpreting various sequences that particularly caught my attention. I pick up the tale sixty pages into the story, and at this point I issue the obligatory SPOILER WARNING! for those of you who haven't read the book yet.

Having met Spider, his trickster brother, the personality of the protagonist, Fat Charlie, begins subtly to change. At work he gets a phone call from his girlfriend Rosie, takes the opportunity to tell her he loves her, and is immediately threatened by his tyrannical boss, Grahame Coats, for making personal calls on company time. So Coats is now not just the refuser of festivity, but is attempting to suppress love. Fat Charlie finds himself contemplating punching Coats, leading to either his being fired or arrested. Uncharacteristically, Fat Charlie decides that either outcome would be "a fine thing." (Anansi Boys p. 61) In other words, Spider's influence is already rubbing off on him.